The Inverted Compass traces the influence of geography on early American writing. Maps, quadrants, and compasses are at the heart of America’s most celebrated stories, and these geographic tools shaped how Americans understood themselves and their relationship to the landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the emerging discipline also provided writers a way to address the young Republic’s most pressing political and ethical problems. The word geography itself - from the Greek geo (earth) and graphia (writing) - articulates the central paradox. Mapping, even as it claims to represent the world, continuously produces it. Literary works follow a similar logic. The Inverted Compass argues that certain early American writers recognized the parallels between mapping and writing and confronted their political implications through narrative fiction. These writers imagined counter-spaces. They created alternate geographies. They inverted the compass. Their allegories, hoaxes, and satires sharpened readers’ awareness of the role of writing and rhetoric in law and government, directing attention to the often-obscured ethical responsibilities related to Westward expansion and the treatment of minority bodies in nineteenth-century America. The Inverted Compass examines the work of Jefferson, Poe, Melville, and Twain alongside exploration narratives, maps, journals, ship logs, field manuals, land surveys, city plans, political cartoons, spelling primers, court cases, land laws, and Congressional documents to uncover the patterns of reading that guide the spatial imagination and its material products.

The sequential probability ratio test is an efficient test procedure compared to the fixed sample size test procedure in the sense that it minimizes the average sample size needed for terminating the experiment at the two specified hypotheses, i.e., at H₀: θ = θ₀ and H₁: θ = θ₁. However, this optimum property does not hold for the values of the testing parameter other than these two hypotheses, especially for those with values between these two. Also the estimation following a sequential test is considered to be difficult, and the usual maximum likelihood estimate is in general biased. The sequential test plans given in MIL-STD-781 do not meet their nominal test risk requirements and the truncation of these test plans is determined by the theory for a fixed sample size test. The contributions of this dissertation are: (1) The distribution of the successive sums of samples from a generalized sequential probability ratio test in the exponential case has been obtained. An exact analysis method for the generalized sequential probability ratio test has been developed as well as its FORTRAN programs based on this distribution. (2) A set of improved sequential probability ratio test plans for testing the mean for the exponential distribution has been established. The improved test plan can meet the test risk requirements exactly and can approximately minimize the maximum average waiting time. (3) The properties of the estimates after a sequential test have been investigated and a bias reduced estimate has been recommended. The general method for constructing the confidence interval after a sequential test has been studied and its existence and uniqueness have been proved in the exponential case. (4) Two modification to the Wald's sequential probability ratio test, the triangular test and the repeated significance test, in the exponential case have been also studied. The results show that the triangular test is very close to the optimal test in terms of minimizing the maximum average sample size, and a method for constructing the triangular test plan has been developed.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the theories that classroom interactions are organized and shaped by the subtle intersecting and overlapping phenomena of race, culture, and gender, and that teachers and their inner-city middle-grade African American male students may make sense, i.e., interpret meaning, very differently in routine, day-to-day classroom interactions. The investigation was informed by Frederick Erickson's (1986) claim that the risk of school failure for students of color may be increased by incongruities between mainstream classroom interaction patterns and the predominant patterns/ways of interacting in the students' home culture. The study was conducted in three fourth-grade classrooms in inner-city schools. Data collected from classroom observations and semi-structured interviews were used to develop sensitizing and definitive typologies, construct individual teacher profiles, and categorize transcribed "talk" into primary and connective themes. Predominant characteristics of teacher-Black male student verbal interactions were identified inductively and presented as assertions (Erickson, 1986) in the findings. Based on the content, structure, and function of each, the selected interactions were characterized as completed continuous, discontinuous, or diminutive. As posited theoretically, the findings revealed differential participation, i.e., interaction peculiarities, specific to many verbal exchanges between each teacher and her/his African American male students. Discontinuities emerged from the different ways language was used by teachers and students. Negative vectors produced in sustained discontinuous interactions resulted in maladaptive meanings for both the teacher and the African American students. A second purpose of the study was to develop a staff development component specifically designed to address teacher-student classroom interactions from cultural perspective and to engender reflective critical inquiry by teachers into their own classroom practices (theories-in-use) and pedagogical principles (espoused theories) as they relate to interactions with their African American male students. Selected segments of analyzed interaction events were used to construct authentic teaching cases which contained embedded dimensions of the theoretical issues examined and the empirical assertions derived from the research. The cases were used as the major instructional tool in the professional development model. This study points toward the need for teachers to be aware of the relationships between language-use, culture, and gender, and the importance of understanding how these factors may play a role in facilitating or constraining equitable educational opportunities for some academically marginalized student groups, particularly pre-adolescent inner-city African American male children.

This dissertation presents an analysis of woman's situation and viewpoint as revealed in the plays El arbol and Los perros and the novels Los recuerdos del porvenir, Testimonios sobre Mariana, and La casa junto al rio by the Mexican Elena Garro. The basis of the analysis is a study of the cultural context, the personal relationships and human interaction, and the atmosphere in the texts under consideration. The female characters function as human beings who are easily recognizable in any Latin American society. By studying Garro's women characters we can also assess the racial and socio-economic atmosphere of the setting. In El arbol this is made clear by the confessional element contained in the drama. In Los perros, and also in La casa junto al rio, we see a fruitless search for paradise lost, for the "good house" of medieval belief. In Garro's texts the feminine characters inhabit a mythic space created by themselves as a means of avoiding the violence of the empiric reality in which they live. In Los recuerdos del porvenir this violence is the direct product of military abuse. Masculine discourse is demythified through witness borne by Vicente, Andre, and Gabrielle in Testimonios sobre Mariana as they prove that Augusto's version of the story lacks credibility and lend verisimilitude to that told by the main character. In La casa junto al rio emphasis is placed on the creative importance of both nostalgia and violence as incentives to make the main character, Consuelo, undertake the adventure of seeking her roots under the pretext of finding herself. By examining the way in which female characters are presented in Garro's works, we are better able to ascertain the viewpoint of this controversial writer and experience the political and social dimensions of Latin America as witnessed by women engaged in the important effort of changing their environment into one that is more sympathetic and understandingly human to the woman.

The purpose of this study was to examine the discourse of six selected Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) session transcripts for effective and promising procedures, questions and discussion strategies. Data sources consisted of session transcripts and interviews to determine how the RMA team's discourse accomplished their intended purposes across six RMA sessions with a fourth grade reader. Phases of the analysis included (1) verifying the existing data sets, (2) selecting six RMA sessions from the set of eleven, (3) conducting and analyzing interviews with the RMA team, (4) structural analysis of sessions, (5) speech act analysis of discourse moves, (6) sequential analysis of question cycles, (7) categorization of patterns that emerged in the data. Three broad discourse themes, based on the RMA team's stated purposes for the RMA sessions, guided the categorization of team members' talk: (1) discourse moves providing revaluing, (2) discourse moves providing instruction, and (3) discourse moves encouraging the reader's strategy use. The structural analysis of the RMA sessions generated elements of the instructional sequences and phases that made up each session, and a profile of RMA session procedures. Findings revealed: the RMA team used a wide range of question types to analyze miscues; discourse patterns involved in instruction and revaluing involved a variety of question cycles, position statement and 'you-statements' about the readers' reading strategies; problematic discourse sequences stemmed from problematic questions, responses and belief structures involved in interactions; by analyzing other readers in comparison with his own reading the reader's self-concept increased.

Described since the beginning of medicine and considered to be the oldest mental illness, depression is understood as a mood, symptom, syndrome and mental disease. It affects a large number of individuals, mainly women during their productive period, in different cultural environments. World Health officials suggest that over 200 million individuals worldwide are affected by one of the forms of depression. Epidemiological and biological studies have revealed the close relationship between depression and several factors, including sex, age, social environment, personality, and genetics. They utilize a single causal model of illness, and neglect the role played by culture in the expression and experience of depressive disorders. As a mood variation, depression is a panhuman phenomenon, but not all cultures recognize depressive disorders as a categorized ailment. Indeed, some cultures (Buddhist) give positive values for depressive complaints and even encourage them; other cultures (Western), however, tolerate depressive symptoms only as acute phenomena. Cross-cultural researchers have discussed the importance of culture for modeling the experience and effects of depression. It is culture which gives positive or negative meaning to depressive phenomena. In this way, anthropologists have questioned the universality of depressive disorders and suggested that depression is a cultural, Western construction. In the second half of the twentieth century, research studies have described the high prevalence rates of depression across cultures. Probably because of emotional and socioeconomic pressures, modern industrialized life exposes individuals to a high risk of depression. Indeed, Western researchers have demonstrated that in each new generation, a greater number of individuals have experienced depression. Contrary to the belief of Brazilian health professionals, lower class African Brazilians are at an increased risk for depressive disorders. The research study for this dissertation was realized in public health services in greater Sao Paulo, Brazil. I interviewed 565 patients and included 105 in the study. All patients presented clinical depression and the majority of them were considered to be chronically impaired. Psychosocial factors such as: gender, age, socioeconomic background, race, migration, marital status, educational background and religious preference were positively associated with the occurrence of depression.

In an attempt to find new genes that are involved in the induction of the SOS system of Escherichia coli, a plasmid library of Escherichia coli K-12 DNA cut with EcoRI was created in a pUC plasmid. The plasmids were transformed into the Escherichia coli strain AT492 containing a sulA::lacZ fusion. Colonies which did not show lacZ expression when the SOS systems had been induced by Mitomycin C were isolated. Four plasmids were found to suppress SOS induction when they were highly expressed. Kohara phage hybridization and restriction mapping suggest that these plasmids contain the genes for lexA and a truncated recA gene ending at the EcoRI site at basepair 1016.

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